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Likely you have tried to do an an svn command on your working copy and it’s giving you the following error:

svn: This client is too old to work with working copy ‘.'; please get a newer Subversion client

Initially I had thought it was a version miss-match with how the repo was checked in, or the server client the repo was hosted with. But it just so happened that I had checked it out with a newer version initially, and then moved it to another box that had a lower subversion client.

In any case, doing a fresh checkout (svn co) on my working copy solved this issue for me. But you may also update your subversion client.

There are many reasons why you may wish to format an existing windows partition over to linux, most commonly it seems to be users coming from a dual boot scenario and now wish to make the full switch to a better operating system (LINUX!). We all want to rid our computers of the nasty virus of microsoft – and dual booting will soon be a memory of the past – virtualization technology is becoming more and more popular.

So on with the show! Lets delete the windows partition and allocate that space to our nice ubuntu linux install. I love the fact that you never have to re-install linux to do such tasks.

Note: I always like to unplug or unmount all of my external drives to make sure I don’t accidentally select the wrong device

Lets grab a GUI tool (GParted)

sudo apt-get install gparted

From the command line lets run it

sudo gparted

A graphical interface will pop up showing you the partitions you have, as well as any unallocated space. (For me it looks like I might pick up an extra 5mb of unallocated space – sweet!)

I started off with an install of windows, so it’s taking up the first bit of my hard drive (/dev/sda1). And I should also note it contains a boot flag – which is important to booting into either my windows or linux operating systems when my computer starts. (If you don’t have a boot flag and proper boot loader, you wont be able to load anything when you turn on your system)

Select the windows partition (Mine is NTFS on /dev/sda1 with a boot flag)

Right click on the entry and “unmount” (if its not mounted, skip this)

Next right click and select DELETE! :)

Now click the Apply (along the top tool bar)

You should now have a large unallocated partition (or more accurately the size of your previous windows install). Great, things are feeling so much better.

Right click the unallocated disk space and select “new”

Select a file system of ext3 and create the partition as primary

Click apply

Depending on the size of the partition we just made, it may take a short while to format the new file system. Once that is completed we’re going to edit the boot menu that existed previously.

Open a terminal and type

sudo nano /boot/grub/menu.list

Towards the bottom of the text file you will see a windows entry similar to the following

Just delete that entry and save. (note if you changed the default boot sequence order, you may wish to set “default 0″ near the top of your menu.list)

Next we will mount the new partition to where we would like when the system starts.

sudo nano /etc/fstab

Add the following to the file (make sure the directory exists) – you can use any folder you wish, I like to keep “my” stuff in the /home directory

# /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1 /home/disk ext3 defaults 0 0

If the directory is outside of your home (ie /home/username), you may need to change the permisions

sudo chown username.username disk/

Lets mount our new partition

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /home/disk

Excellent, all is good! we now have lots of extra space to add games, movies or whatever your heart desires!

Note: You may also want to add the boot flag to your linux partition mounted on / (if it didn’t have the boot flag to begin with). Just right click the partition entry in GParted and select manage flags (selecting “boot”)

When you restart your system everything should be A-OK. The new partition will automatically mount to the location you declared in the /etc/fstab file.

In the 9.04 ubuntu upgrade they got rid of the ctrl + alt + backspace GUI/Gnome restart. Basically this command forces (kills) the Gnome GUI. It’s useful for when you have an unresponsive program, or any other reason you may want to KILL your desktop session quickly ;)

Either way to re-enable the ctrl + alt + backspace in ubuntu just add the following to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Section “ServerFlags”
Option “DontZap” “false”
EndSection

There is also another command that does the same thing, but not quite as intuitive (which if you have a keyboard with a special “function” key, it may require an extra annoying kepress).

It’s kind of annoying with the new 9.04 ubuntu upgrade, where your system update notifier pops up on screen! There is probably some reasoning behind this (perhaps they have quicker turnover rates on upgrades)… but I can’t stand it. I do update my system, but on my own time. Having the system tray icon is more then enough to let me know an upgrade is waiting.

To fix the ubuntu update notifier from coming up on screen (turn it back to its “normal” mode) run the following from the command line

If you find your SSH client is taking too long to connect (and ask you for the password), or you’re trying to SFTP and it’s timing out before the password prompt. It’s probably trying to do a DNS lookup!

It seems obvious you’ve come across the following error while trying to setup SSL certificates on apache.

Error code: ssl_error_rx_record_too_long

Well more often than not, you have something mis-configured! (Likely the listening port: 443). What you might want to do is check that your firewall or iptables allows incoming connections on 443.

Ubuntu:

#sudo ufw allow 443

Ok, wonderful – that probably didn’t fix your problem. But now try going to the following address

http://www.domain.tld:443

If you’ve successfully seen something at the above page, it means your sites are listening on that port for non-ssl. I’ll assume that your apache virtual host file has something along the lines of:

NameVirtualHost *

<VirtualHost *>

What you’re going to want to do is force your vhosts to listen specifically on the proper ports. Changing to the following:

NameVirtualHost *:80

<VirtualHost *:80>

If you’re using ubuntu your ports.conf file should likely have 443 enabled on the listening port, and you may also have default-ssl listed in your /etc/apache2/sites-available/ folder. In which case you may want to enable that.

now while all looks right, you probably won’t be able to get online. You can restart your interface with

sudo /etc/init.d/network restart

if you add a custom route to the host and set the default gateway you should then be able to access something

sudo route add -host 9.9.0.1 eth0

sudo route add default gw 9.9.0.1

hopefully everything should be good to go! Make sure that your /etc/resolve.conf file has proper name servers for your isp.

nameserver 123.123.123.123

Now in order to make these changes persistant on startup/reboot you may add them to the /etc/network/interfaces file, but typically that has never worked for me across any distro.

What I do is add them to my rc.local file (which is executed after all other system modules are brought online).

sudo nano /etc/rc.d/rc.local

/sbin/route add -host 9.9.0.1 eth0
/sbin/route add default gw 9.9.0.1

This should help bring your network back online in case of power outage or reboot. Keep in mind that if you /etc/init.d/network restart you will likely have to manually add those routes by hand again. (no biggie).

First and foremost, openDNS sucks! They’re trying to offer an advantage over how regular DNS works… but to be honest… there is no advantage other than you’re regular run of the mill DNS. When I type something wrong, I want an error! When I type something right and you spit back something wrong, that pisses people off!

Name resolutions are totally wack! If you use openDNS with ubuntu, centos, or most any other linux distro – you may notice you cannot update your systems! Total crap! And who’s to say they don’t inject their own DNS record so that when you mange to update your system – you’re actually installing a root kit embedded into a package you think is legit.

Using openDNS is the absolute biggest security hole you can possibly think of. All those phishing scams you’re afraid of… well they become 100% transparant when you’re relaying off their servers… they can send you to any page they wish to grab facebook passwords, email passwords, whatever! And guess what, you’re none the wiser! Your address bar still has the address you think it is, but you could very well be connected to a different server.